This text is the first chapter of the book Desin for more-than-human futures: Towards post-anthropocentric and decolonial perspectives. Edited by Martin Tironi, Marcos Chilet, Pablo Hermansen and Carola Ureta Marín.
By Martín Tironi
In June 2021, the Chilean Pavilion won first place at the London Design Biennale. Entitled “Tectonic Resonances from the South: From User-Centred Design to Planet-Centred Design,” the pavilion explored opportunities to redefine our ways of relating to the planet through design. Through a sonorous intervention with lithophones sourced from several Chilean quarries, the pavilion’s creators sought to reconnect the practice of design to the materiality of the planet using one of its earliest technologies: stones tools. This curatorial experience of a radical return to the past sought to revitalise a decolonial way of feeling and thinking, proposing a language that expands design opportunities in the face of our current environmental unsustainability. While the origins of design are traditionally anchored in the European industrial revolution, to a modern narrative of linear progress that has proposed instrumentalising the planet to achieve more human worlds, the pavilion was conceived as an invitation to situate design in a more-than human horizon: a practice that should explore ways of coexisting in correspondence (Ingold, 2020) with the designs, interventions and forces developed by other species and agencies. There is certainly an ironic gesture here: a pavilion on a decolonial and not anthropocentric design exhibited in London, the epicentre of European imperialism and modern rationality. However, rather than attempting a sort of return to post-colonial purism, we are interested in generating border interventions and hybrid spaces in which the conceptualisation and practices of design emerge from the co-construction of forms of knowledge and gazes.
The intention of this book is to expand on some of the premises and reflections behind the construction of that pavilion. It brings together authors from different fields and disciplines to address opportunities for engaging in a form of design that is involved with new narratives that interrogate the reign of the anthropocentric and blaze paths towards protecting other post-extractivist epistemologies. At a time of environmental crises in which the human species is threatening its own survival and the highest level of exacerbation of the idea of a future and technological innovation, it is important to discard certain anthropocentric categories in order to situate design beyond the role that it has traditionally held in the capitalist world, creating opportunities to build more just and sustainable worlds.
Design for more-than-human futures is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by an ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability installed in the designs that outfit our lives. In the face of increasingly uncertain futures monopolised by techno-intelligent prediction which tends to limit the conversation around opportunities to those which currently exist, it is crucial to develop undisciplined and pluriversal approaches (Escobar, 2018) that allow us to project shared life alternatives. While today more than ever the speed and radicalness of socioenvironmental changes make it increasingly difficult to be part of them (Latour, 2017), design cannot be a mere spectator, nor can it continue to replicate clientelist and instrumentalist strategies for relating to the world.
Questioning the notion of human-centred design is central to this discussion. It is not only a theoretical and methodological concern, but an ethical need to critically rethink the modern, colonialist, and anthropocentric inheritance that resonates in design culture. As its various chapters demonstrate, the book is situated in the contemporary discussion regarding how to rethink design from a post-anthropocentric and decolonial way of making, thinking, and feeling. The authors share the need to interrupt what design has been doing from a modern-colonial epistemological matrix.
One of the premises that cuts across this book is that the scenario of multi-system crisis that we are moving through (social, environmental, public health, economic, etc.) demands a renewed capacity for design to imagine and make possible alternative futures. The unsustainability and environmental crisis that we are experiencing is not the fortuitous result of bad decisions. Rather, it is the product of specific designs that are deeply rooted in our ways of relating to and inhabiting the world, materialised in products, services or experiences. This points to the importance of generating a process of “inverse engineering” or ontological detoxification (De la Cadena and Escobar, in this book), which allow us to undesign the elements behind the dynamics of unsustainability.
The practice of design should explore and experiment with new sustainable ways of relating to and being in the world, forming different modes of problematising the present and imagining futures. As other authors (Escobar, 2018; Fry, 2020) have argued, there is a need to interrogate or, rather, redesign the culture of design in its ontological, methodological, and ethical spheres. If we truly want to counteract the process of defuturing that we are experiencing, which consists of creating futures without futures, as Tony Fry (2020) puts it, we cannot continue to inform design using ways of thinking that have already been structured, classified, and disciplined in the modern-colonialist cannon. On the contrary — and this is the call made in this book — we believe that design must be capable of developing speculative thought (Coccia, 2019), thought based on a break with the current development model that manages to make available ways of projecting more inclusive environments with the various entities that co-inhabit our planet.
This introduction is organised as follows: the first section addresses the ecological crisis that forces us to question the suppositions, practices, and values upon which modern design was founded. In the second section, I propose three operations or displacements: a) planet-oriented design; b) pluralising future regimes; and c) decolonising the practices of design for an ethics of reparation. I seek to use these displacements to explore how design can become a means to imagine other ways of inhabiting the world and containing the damage associated with the modern-colonialist system. Finally, I describe the chapters included in this book.
Designing on a planetary disaster
The escalating ecosystemic crisis that we have experienced over the past few years has generated an urgent need to examine the foundations of design (Fry & Nocek, 2020). Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has shaken the social and economic order in an unprecedented manner, has exacerbated the experience of global civilising crisis and revealed the need to mobilise alternatives to the dominant ways of projecting lifestyles (Manzini & Menichinelli, 2021).
Various forces have developed over the past few years to understand the importance of human activity in the acceleration of the dynamics of crisis and deterioration of the land macro-environment. As many academics have noted, one important concept for understanding the scope and impacts of this process — due to the lack of a more adequate one — is the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2006; Ferrando, 2016; Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2013; Latour, 2015), the most recent geological period on Earth which has been influenced by humans, or anthropogenised.
This notion gives way to attempts to explain or give meaning to the capacity that we have as a species to leave a scar on our planet’s geological history. Scholars have argued that humans have been capable of moving from being just another biological agent to being a geological force, marking a stratigraphic layer on the terrestrial mantle (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2013). Humans have ceased to be conditioned by the environment, and our species has now become an agent that conditions the land system. This notion places humans alongside the forces that participated in forming the planet as we know it and led to a present in ruins that will inevitably end without us (Stengers and Goffey, 2015). Or, as the late Latour states, what happens to the planet is not in the future, but is happening now, and no matter what we do to contain it, the threat will remain with us for centuries (2015).
Recognising the usefulness of the concept coined as the basis for the construction of ways of making and thinking that are more sensitive to the environmental crisis, it seems important to clarify the limits that this notion presents for rethinking possible futures (Haraway, 2016; 2018). The homogenisation of responsibility is the first problem, in that it tends to assume a universalisation of a life system. We must remember that we would need five Earths if we were to maintain the level of consumption of the average US citizen and we continue to move forward with this development model. As such, various authors speak to the need to recognise different levels of responsibility that fall on human action, making the necessary distinctions to understand the modes of life that reaffirm ecological damage (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2013; Alvater et al., 2016). It is not a question of listing and assigning blame, but of recognising that it is a unique and contextualised — both ontologically and epistemologically — form of being human and making a world that is in crisis and turning around this loss of relational worlds of being in the world (Escobar, 2018; Fry & Nocek, 2020). As such, while the influence of humanity on the environment has always existed, many point to capitalist modernity as the accelerator of this dynamic of ecosystem transformation. In a strict sense, we should be discussing the capitalocene period (Haraway, 2016).
Several authors have shown that our capitalist modernity is inseparable from the process of colonisation (Escobar, 2018; De la Cadena, 2015) and its capacity to expand a particular understanding and valorisation of the planet and all of its more-than-human components, in which the latter are conceived of as mere resources for the satisfaction of human needs. From this perspective, the Earth becomes an object of appropriation, exploitation, and consumption, forgetting, as Tim Ingold would say, its condition as the foundation for all that lives (2020). In his book Facing Gaia (2017) regarding the new climate system that the Anthropocene represents, Bruno Latour shows a willingness to emancipate humans from Earth, excluding or denying the relationship of mutual codependence and relational interdependence between humans and the environment.
There is no question that the position that design has occupied in this context is marked by its function as a tool for acting out and executing this specific way of understanding, defining, and exploiting Earth. Unsustainability is not limited to a matter of ideological principles. It is also designed and expressed through concrete designs. Some authors argue that the modern-colonial system has imposed certain limits on the way in which design is practiced, turning design into a negative ontology, that is, a design that does not problematise its strategies of production, intervention, and relationships that it establishes with its surroundings (Fry, 2020; Tlostanova, 2017; Vasquez, 2017). This Anthropocene perspective focused on the satisfaction of human desires of certain characteristics has impacted the socio-ecological dynamics on multiple scales, to the point that many aspects of biodiversity have been reconfigured and even eliminated because of our intervention (Altvater, et al., 2016).
The history and urgency are clear: environmental degradation, prolonged droughts, the advance of desertification, the extinction of multiple species due to the loss of ecosystems, pollution, higher temperatures, the expansion of pandemics and their consequences for social gaps. The stamp of modern living has been structured under an expectation of exponential growth that is directly related to a need to increase industrial capacity to support consumption and population growth patterns (Altvater et al., 2016). This world view of linear growth and a future based on consumption also implies an expansion of a fictitious experience in which the border of possibilities continues to extend itself based on a sanctification of technological development, leading us to believe that the planet and its multiple ecosystems are capable of absorbing everything we decide to throw at it and design. To put it more directly, we live under the idea that the development model will deploy technical tools that can compensate for environmental losses and damages without questioning the ethical and moral exigencies that this challenge poses (Pelluchon, 2020).
This techno-optimist illusion that has developed over the past few years has not only crumbled through the accumulation of catastrophic events that surpass the limits of the technological capacity to understand them. It also has created a driving need to identify conceptual tools and actions that can make us project futures for coexistence with Earth, alternative and more sustainable ways of inhabiting. However, it is important to note that to date the ecological crisis has mainly been considered a technical problem under the expectation that technological development will provide answers to the multi-systemic crisis that we are facing. We know that the current environmental crisis makes us examine our models for making and inhabiting the world in a much deeper way and that the discussion of their solutions cannot be reduced.
This is where design can play a key role, developing tools for creating worlds and rethinking our relationship with the environment. There are currently many initiatives and projects that show that design is experiencing a particularly vital and generative moment, expanding the political discussion on possible worlds, and contributing to counteracting the negative effects of the extractivist and instrumental logic of our relationship with the environment. Everything suggests that the current socio-environmental crisis requires re-imagining or de-designing nearly every aspect of modern lifestyle, exploring actions that allow us to project more sustainable and inclusive futures.
In this regard, approaches such as decolonial design (Tlostanova, 2017; Fry, 2020), autonomous design (Escobar, 2018), transition design (Irwin et al, 2015) and design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2018) as well as interspecies approaches (Coccia, 2018, Tironi & Hermansen, 2020) are of particular interest. Without overlooking the differences between these approaches, one interest that these perspectives share is the importance of challenging the conventional role that design has been given as a decorative technique or functional action. Instead, we must position it as a political role in discussions on social justice, social innovation, ecological or decolonial transitions, etc. In short, design must become involved with efforts to problematise how we inhabit the world and connect with others. As Escobar argues in Design for Pluriverse, today design must participate more actively in questioning the social systems that nurture our current anthropocentric development system, generating conditions for projecting plural, post-capitalist, post-patriarchal and post-human communities.
In the pages that follow, I propose four displacements or operations that design can activate to contain/respond to the damage associated with the modern-colonial way of conceiving of design.
Towards a planetary design
Over the past few years, the idea of human centred design has invaded the practices, discourses, and discussions about design. This approach has become one of the most influential axioms over the past few years and has catapulted design into the sphere of public policy (Holeman, Kane, 2020), organisations (Boy, 2017) and services (Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011).
The idea of user-centred design does not only circulate as one of the epistemological foundations of the main schools of design around the world but has also become the bar used to measure good design. This has led to the development of all manner of products, solutions and innovations based on this approach. This trend has managed to amplify itself through the introduction of the design thinking approach, which proposes various steps (empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test) for identifying problems, needs and possible solutions (Giacomin, 2014).
One of the main theories of this axiom is that design should respond to the needs, concerns, and desires of the user, responding through products, services and solutions that are friendly to users’ needs. Under this premise, all design processes must define the identity, interactions, and visions of the receivers’ world prior to engaging in any formal development. This allows design to inscribe scenarios of action or scripts (Akrich, 1987) on the product that are appropriate for the needs of the people involved. In the end, this translates into the formulation of a certain type of “compatible” user. We could thus say that this turn has humanised design, seeking to translate, represent, interpret, and intervene in the material and symbolic environments in which humans act.
While user-centred design has created important contributions and innovations, everything suggests that this paradigm should be questioned in the context of our current environmental crisis. The complexity of the current challenges suggests that the notion of human-centred — and its focus on human protagonists — is insufficient to think and make in the face of the challenges of the Anthropocene and digital society, making it necessary to begin to design from relational and ecological approaches that are more open to unforeseeable events and the changing stakeholders that are to come.
Beyond the legitimate critiques that have been made in this regard that user-centred design tends to label participants as relatively stable and static entities (Richi, 2019), it seems fundamental to recognise the need to decentre design from the human, rethinking its capacities and scopes in the face of inter-species environments and worlds. The idea of a constant linear evolution in which the future of inhabiting depends on human design is called into question when human inhabitants seem to have come to the brink of collapse and are pushed by other forces and more-than-human agents. Concretely, we question the idea of viewing major cities as the pinnacle of humanity and focusing the design of inhabitable orbits on the capacity to build and expand cities as centres of consumption.
While over the past few decades the interest in exploring the notion of coexistence beyond human limits (Stengers, 2005; Latour, 2007; Coccia, 2018) has been highlighted, in the design field we find limited work on exploring forms of coexistence between humans and more-than-humans. The efforts that exist in this area share a desire to explore experimental and speculative tools to understand the citizenship of more-than-human entities (Binder, Brandt, Ehn, & Halse, 2015; Lenskjold & Jönsson, 2017; Forlano, 2017) or understand how more-than-human agencies become part of the design process (Rice, 2018, Tironi & Hermansen, 2018; Wakkary, 2021). These studies also share the assessment regarding the marked instrumental, individualist, and anthropocentric nature of humancentred design, encouraging us to question community-oriented designs and more-than-human environments. This leads to questions such as: How can one approach design not merely from the idea of “design opportunity” or that of “users’ needs,” but from the alignments and intersections between humans and the environment (Ingold, 2020)? How can we incorporate the making of design into a relational world and go beyond the human (Kohn, 2013), where multiple epistemes and cosmos participate at the same time?
The notion of planet-oriented design developed in the context of the Chilean pavilion at the 2021 London Biennale takes up the need to expand the scale and range of political action of design, exploring the epistemic and ontological bases of human-oriented design. That is, a design that is no longer oriented towards stable and discrete human entities, but that is open to the composition of relational and “other-than-human” worlds (Lien & Pálsson, 2020; Savransky, 2021) in which the focus is on the ecology of human and more-than-human relationships that sustain the diversity of life. Given that the notion of modern design has mainly been based on an individualist and utilitarian logic, the question is how to project post-anthropocentric design guided by an ethics of co-existence between the diversity of experiences, materialities and beings that inhabit the planet (De La Bellacasa, 2017; Latour, 2012; Vazquez, 2017). Such a design would make it possible to move from a rationalist logic that understands beings as static to a logic of becoming (Ingold, 2017) in which the value is placed on the web of partial interdependencies and interconnections that comprise the problem.
Moving from human-centred design to planet-oriented design is not a call to forget human problems or much less to turn it into a matter of an elite that is exhibited in galleries. On the contrary, it is a question of recognising that worlds “exceed” modern categories (De la Cadena, 2015) and thus require other designs to offer a mechanism for listening to realities that cannot be reduced to the nomenclature of “user,” “service,” or “strategy.” As such, it is a question of establishing a more determined commitment between design and the multi-systemic and interrelated crises that we are experiencing, generating the actions necessary to project a more inclusive and relational emerging civilisation (Manzini, 2015). Repositioning design beyond the human means opening up the possibility of exploring instruments, practices and theories that allow one to think or repair the world in the face of increasingly devastating anthropogenic forces (Pelluchon, 2020) in which humans and more-than-humans, technologies and vegetables, tsunamis and animals, data and viruses are involved. Recognizing the incapacity of Eurocentric critical thinking to project post-capitalist alternatives or to define the possible beyond the frameworks established by the current development system (Escobar, 2018), design presents a speculative capacity to open multiple futures in harmony with the heterogeneous realities and height of contemporary ecosystemic challenges in which the very notion of humanity is challenged by technological developments and ongoing socio-ecological disasters.
Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal (2005) is a fundamental reference for thinking through the implications and reaches of the notion of planet-oriented design. Stengers (2005) and Latour (2007) have argued in favour of opening the traditional notion of politics to a “cosmopolitics.” This forces us to rethink political action from an “ontological pluralism,” opening itself up to new types of human-environmental relationships. It is a more-than-human concept of politics in which instead of limiting this notion to a substantialist enunciation, it analyses how other entities (animals, rivers, technologies, rocks, vegetables, etc.) can be invested with certain qualities that allow them to resist, diagram and produce political events. This involves challenging how materiality (and other entities) are conceived of as elements subjected to human purposes and, on the contrary, taking the autonomy that objects and more-than-human entities may present seriously. As Isabelle Stengers notes, the cosmopolitical proposal contains a question regarding how “designing the political scene” protects us from anthropocentric egotism according to which “humans of good will decide in the name of the general interest” (Stengers, 2005: 1002).
As such, rethinking a notion of politics that is not limited to managing exclusively human interests is not only a philosophical matter, but a matter of design (Tironi & Hermansen, 2018). The idea of planet-oriented design seeks to address this need and to explore a form of decentring through codesign operations that allow other entities that have become invisible to be included. The invitation is thus to project a design not for the problems of a particular body that has been posited as universal (male, white, heterosexual, of a certain socio-cultural and economic condition) that lives in a specific context (the modern city). Rather, we should understand design’s potential as a relational space in which each of our interventions have both positive and negative impacts that go beyond our own corporality, episteme, and ontology. It is therefore necessary to become conscious of how our way of designing and living in the world comes up against and conflicts with other more-than-human entities and bodies with whom we share the planet.
The work of Stàhl, Tham and Holtorf (2017) shows us how archaeology has found evidence of complex forms of humans inhabiting the world that emerged before capitalism and allowed for creation and design that sought balance with those more-than-human agencies and agents, allowing us to identify and come back together with design projects that were silenced by capitalism. This exercise presented by the authors allows us to break with the concept of Design as a discipline that comes from the consolidation of capitalism and gives us an opening onto referents that we were ignoring and that can shed light on lines of communication that can be established with other ways of making and living in the world.
Over the past few years, we have seen how these ontological clashes continue to grow and become more radical. Together with the series of catastrophic events that have taken place over the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how more-than-human agencies and bodies can inundate the reality that we have built and designed thinking only of our bodies and ways of being. Like most of the bodies and beings that are hardly perceived (Lewis et al., 2018), the virus often has no name in our world system and goes beyond the ontological parameters that define the limits of the real and possible (De la Cadena, 2018). However, as these entities and beings manifest, they call into question our ways of living, as we have seen with the pandemic. The experience of the past few years shows us how these agencies of invisible beings and bodies become an uncontrollable problem for institutions. They escape our epistemologies, and we make the decision to ignore them until it becomes impossible to continue to do so. These agencies are often placed in a subordinate position because our categories cannot translate and capture them (Blaser, 2012). As Helmreich (2008) argues, the nature of beings that are hardly perceived such as bacteria or viruses has a complexity that escapes the capacity for human understanding. However, upon becoming aware of their implications for our ways of living -as is the case of COVID-19 we can understand the fragility of our own existence, showing how these subjects can destroy our world without even wanting to.
From this perspective, Latour’s proposal of creating spaces for listening to and addressing these agencies as “matters of concern” (2004), suggests the need to mobilise design as a mechanism for projecting and experiencing modes of coexistence on earth. Recognising that we are earthly before we are human, as we constantly evolve with other beings that coinhabit the earth (Latour, 2017b), the question is how to establish alliances and collaborations with other earthly actors, respecting their singularities and not reducing them to human designs. As such, one of the challenges of planetoriented design is precisely to promote modes through which these ignored agencies and corporalities can be incorporated into the political debate. It is not only a question of anticipating conflicts and establishing patterns of peaceful coexistence (Latour, 2017a), but also of designs that allow us to recognise how these same agencies and bodies can redesign the environments that we inhabit (Coccia, 2018). As a continuation of this proposal, philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) presents the notion of “matters of care,” endowing these agencies with a presence and importance in daily human life and recognising their role as agents that can escape and impact human corporalities. When we recognize that the question of habitability no longer only depends on human rationalities and interests, but on relearning to establish alliances and collaborations with earthly actors that co-inhabit the planet, an ethical responsibility for design to activate forms of attachment with this heterogeneous territory that cannot be reduced to human logics emerges.
Pluralising regimes of the future
The second displacement that I will develop to contain the damage associated with the moderncolonialist system of understanding design has to do with problematising the notion of future that informs and has guided most of the practice of design.
Over the past few years, we have experienced an inflation of analysis of the idea of future. In the current context of social, economic, and environmental crisis, a rich discussion of the futures that are possible for humanity has opened, and various assessments and ideas about what could be done to address these crises have been developed. While there has always been significant interest in understanding and estimating the future, we are in the presence of a true market of futures, with all manner of sophisticated technologies, protocols and methodologies focused on understanding and anticipating futures.
The pandemic has radicalised this need to pre-design the future given the growing sensation of a lack of reference for a certain and stable tomorrow. Various authors have noted that contemporary society has probably never been as future oriented as it is now due to the growing uncertainty regarding the future of society and the collapse of the planet (Bryant & Knight, 2019).
Between the various spaces of development and the emergence of “futurological work,” we find two fields that are undergoing significant expansion: the first linked to the development of predictive systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the second is a renewed interest in what are called Future Studies (Mazé, 2019) in different fields of knowledge.
Over the past few years, we have seen a true socio-technical imaginary emerge around the predictive and anticipatory capacities of algorithmic systems based on AI. Thanks to the progress made by algorithmic systems that estimate future behaviours based on current or past data (Big Data) left behind by people or events, it is said that we are experiencing new “systems of anticipation” (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke, 2009) in which the idea of future becomes something that can be manipulated and calculated through the prediction of smart systems. Authors like Rouvroy & Berns (2013) have noted that AI systems are computing all possible futures and preparing actions in the present in order to neutralise risks. These “defuturisation techniques” that provide greater security do not only tend to reduce the variety of future possibilities, but also lead to a process of rationalisation and economisation of the future. “Products of prediction” or “futures markets” (Zuboff, 2019) thus usher in the expansion of mechanisms of predicting the future. While the promoters of these predictive systems present their operations as “objective” and perfectly democratic facts (without references to exclusions based on class, religion, or gender), it is essential to politicise and pluralise future systems at a time that is increasingly controlled by these automated systems. In other words, we must critically examine the hierarchies, biases and concepts of the world that materialise in these initiatives based on algorithmic prediction, recognising the role that they can play in design to generate future alternatives.
But together with the expansion of these predictive systems based on Big Data and AI, over the past few years there has been a great deal of interest in crossing design with the field of Future Studies, developing different approaches and methods for prospecting and packaging futures. These future design methods are being used a great deal in the world of innovation, design thinking and policymaking, and have allowed design to successfully enter the realm of prospecting and forecasting. However, and without intending to be exhaustive, these future studies demonstrate clear limitations when it comes to exploring problematising paths that allow future systems to be decolonised and pluralised.
First, recognising the potential that these approaches have for decision-making in the organisational field, these perspectives focus on creating certainties about the future instead of tensing or questioning it (Ricci, 2019). Along these lines, these studies are dominated by an effort to “package” methodologies -many of them hyper-rationalist- that allow experts to capture scenarios and identify the plausibility of certain trends in terms of being reproduced in the future. For example, the “futures cone” (from Voros, 2008) is very common in business circuits and prospective studies, and there are four types of them: possible (might happen), plausible (could happen), probable (likely to happen) and preferred (want to happen).
As several authors have shown (Forlano & Mathew, 2014; Angheloiu et al. 2017), these studies tend to be limited to the exploration of future products or services for commercial purposes or for the development of business strategies, and they tend to leave aside the political and performative aspects involved in the mobilisation of images of the future. As Mazé (2019) states, the exercise of projecting futures is a political act in that it involves a valorisation, certain moral, cultural and social preferences, and conditions what could be. In other words, there is a trend in these approaches to reproduce the status quo and not think from alterity, from futures discarded by certain hegemonic cannons. In their effort to generate or package certain certainties about future trends to generate comparative advantages or minimise risks, many of these approaches lose sight of the discussion of the implications of mobilising socio-material configurations of futures, moving away from the transformative and problematising objective that we need in our current time of crisis.
Tensing futures
If we really wish to take the socio-environmental causes of the global pandemic and environmental crisis seriously, we cannot continue to inform the prefiguration of futures from the same thought systems that are being questioned in innovation, unlimited growth, and technological development. It is thus necessary to critique the dominant notion of the future that governs the world of innovation and design.
A concept of the future is circulating that is anchored to the modern and colonial idea of an always prosperous future that offers growing opportunities. Here future is nearly synonymous with progress and development (Escobar, 2014), emphasising an abstract and abundant future emancipated from the tradition and the past, where the modern surpasses the non-modern, denying attachments and relationships to the Earth and the past. Sousa Santos (20018) describes this hegemonic concept of time that is unique to modernity as a monoculture because it excludes the differences, multiplicity, and other modes of experiencing temporalities.
In his latest book, Oú atterrir (2017b), Bruno Latour discusses the new climate regime that the Anthropocene represents, a planet that this particular universalist and linear concept that is part of the project of the moderns has taken to the will of emancipating humans from earth, excluding or denying a mutual relationship of co- and interdependence between humans and the environment. It is thus a unidirectional and profoundly anthropocene concept of the future in which the value of the future is oriented towards generating a world at the service of human interests.
The installation of this hegemonic future anchored to the idea of progress and promoted by the extraordinary force of modern capitalism does not only cancel out the creation of alternative futures, but also eliminates the critical capacity to prefigure alternatives. In its permanent capacity to reinvent itself (Boltanski and Chiapelo, 1999), modern capitalism defines the limits of the real and the possible. The installation of this concept of totalising future stands as an obstacle to alterity, projecting from other world views, aesthetics, and realities.
A decolonial view of the future or, if one prefers, the task of challenging the globalising coloniality, should start from assuming that the deficit or lack of future does not only have to do with exhausting the modern idea of progress (Latour, 2013) but also is related to a situation in which the future folds or is encapsulated by an omnipresent present. This is a future that does not require a project and becomes a form of expansion of the present in which there is really no alternative to that which exists.
This becomes totalising — a “continuous present,” as Day, Lury & Ward (2021) call it, that captures the ability to narrate and desire other possible worlds. It is a presentified future in which the present becomes everything that exists in the real, generating futures that are already exhausted.
Projecting decolonial futures or futures from the South also involves taking seriously the idea developed by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2013): the future is neither unique nor shared by everyone, nor is it a political matter. Rather, it is a contested field, as multiple socio-material configurations seek to organise and mobilise ideas of the future.
In this regard, the design philosopher Tony Fry (2020) calls on the design world to produce “futures that have futures” by stopping the process of “defuturisation” that tends to cancel the emergence of other worlds, eliminating the opportunity to access counter-hegemonic futures. We must build tools that make it possible to open those windows onto alternative futures, not to anticipate, calculate or capitalise them, but to create alternatives to unsustainable or inequitable ways of inhabiting the planet (De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018). The strategies developed in the fields of fiction and speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Smith et at; 2016; Tharp & Tharp, 2019; Wilkie, et at, 2017) that seek to create experiences of defamiliarisation, alienation or tension to redirect norms and provoke discussions of alternative futures or presents are very interesting for prefiguring those decolonial future alternatives. On a more pragmatic level, some are creating tools to visualise sustainable transitions (Fuad-Luke, 2013; Irwin, 2015; Wilkie, Michael & Plummer-Fernandez, 2015; Gaziulusoy et al, 2019), or to generate fictional prototypes that help question the relationship with the given (Forlano & Mathew, 2014) or to create relational spaces between humans and more-than-humans (Binder et al.,
2015;Lenskjold & Jönsson 2017; Tironi & Hermansen, 2020)
More-than-human futures
A decolonial design or design from the South, as Escobar (2018) puts it, should generate tools for moving towards the idea of more-than-human futures (Tironi & Hermansen, 2020; 2018; Granjou &
Salazar, 2016; De la Cadena, 2018). That is, questioning the future category confined to the ‘human club’ (Stengers, 2005) is undoubtedly one of the most important shifts if we want to think about our conditions of habitability.
The practice of design has depended on an anthropocentric modern tradition to a great extent, taking up the ontological dualism between nature and society (Latour, 2013) and responding critically to the impetus of appropriation and dominion of nature. This dualism, which tends to address nature as an object and society as a subject (Descola, 1996; 2001) finds its maximum expression in the advent of the Anthropocene, producing a loss of relational and ecological modes of inhabiting (Coccia, 2018).
One of the pending challenges is to explore a design for futures oriented in a post-dualist practice and ethics in which the designed futures are not solely for human purposes. In other words, it involves projecting worlds in which humans, and more-than-humans can coexist, enriching each other in an interspecies process of correspondence (De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018; Ingold, 2020). If design traditionally points to how to achieve more human futures, favouring white men and seriously impacting the nature of the planet, a challenge for decolonial design would be assuming that futures are not exclusively designed by humans or for humans, but for multi-species, shared futures and designed with technological agencies, plants, viruses, telluric forces, rivers, traditions, etc. in mind (Granjou & Salazar, 2016; Coccia, 2018). Looking at the worldmaking capacity of different entities (Tsing, 2015) is not only a call to humility in design, but also a matter of being open to projecting new modes of more just and sustainable coexistence.
Repositioning design in discussions of more-than-human futures is an unavoidable ethical responsibility. It is also an invitation to explore design’s capacities to repair the world in the face of increasingly devastating anthropogenic forces. Designing for more-than-human futures means moving from a techno-paternalist logic that seeks to domesticate the planet, and move to a relational logic, in which heterogeneous actors can collaborate to create interspecies connections or disconnection.
Decolonising design practices for an ethics of reparations
At a time of searching for modes of emancipation from industrial design and new epistemologies that allow us to rethink our modes of habitability, there is a renewed interest in developing design practices from critical and decolonial approaches. It has become urgent to gather epistemologies and practices framed by plural ethics that recognise worlds and world views that are often excluded from what is now hegemonic design. As Escobar (2018) argues, the challenge of moving towards decolonial design is not only a theoretical issue. Rather, it points to facing and taking up the socio-environmental responsibilities that design has had in the damages that we currently experience as planet.
However, one cannot continue to think about design’s “responsibility” from mere diligence or professional correctness when developing a product or service. Design should engage with power relations that are established in the same form of producing and projecting and that are constantly expressed in certain decisions and the consequences of using design. This problem is what Sasha Costanza-Chock attempts to address in her study Design Justice (2018), where design is conceived of as a tool for liberation of oppressed groups even as she recognises the intersectionality of perspectives for discussion and the web of injustices present in the context in which it is inserted. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010) argues, the configuration of relationships of subordination has its roots in an epistemology and ontology that determines the type of solutions that are developed in the face of the ecological crisis.
Many of the solutions that circulate in conscious consumption, responsible design, or circular design today, inevitably fall into the parameters inscribed in this extractivist matrix. These theoretical attempts to resolve the socio-environmental crisis aligning with the dominant ontology — and responsible for many of our problems — end up reproducing the conditions that limit our understanding to address and explore problems (Haraway, 2016). This leads to the search for the solution being captured by that which is its cause, imposing limitations for taking up and repairing the damages created by human activity.
The attempts that have emerged from the global South in response to the project of the late capitalism of the global North and its unique form of design claim those ontologies and epistemologies that are sought out and invisible and that modernization and development projects tried to eradicate after the consolidation of postcolonial States. Authors like Colombia’s Arturo Escobar (see also Gutiérrez Borrero, 2015; 2020) have been part of the theoretical line of thought that has tried to reposition ontologies and epistemologies from the South, defying the modern/colonial parameters of relating to the world and the earth. One of the hypotheses that emerge from these works is that Euro-Western design, which has gone hand in hand with the capitalist model of development, installed a canonical and universal idea of design that expands, subsuming other forms of making. This leads to an invisibilisation of “designs otherwise,” which existed and continue to exist under names and concepts that are different from those of modern design (Gutiérrez Borrero, 2022).
This process of resurgences brings with it new Design proposals. In his book designs for the pluriverse (2018), Escobar introduces us to the concept of ontological design -using works by authors like Winograd and Flores (1986) and Willis (2006)- as the conversation between opportunities for active participation in the understanding and creation of subjects (Winograd and Flores, 1986), giving way to new ritual forms, ways of being and modes of making. The main question posed in this proposal revolves around the recognition that the existence of worlds beyond the dualist tradition that relates to the world from instrumentalization to make room for local designs that help to project pluriversal ways of life oriented towards saving life and the planet instead of its appropriation and domination. In this way, “decolonial pluriversality is decentred and stresses the provinciality of the universalized Western concepts by constantly juxtaposing them with their incommensurable non-
Western parallels and opposites” (Tlostanova, 2017).
This proposal also stems from the work of Tony Fry in his book Becoming Human by Design (2012). He argues that the modernising project and its hegemonic consolidation through its unique form of design perpetuates a systemic suppression of forms of relating that do not fit into existing ontological and epistemological parameters, denying other futures and alternatives the opportunity to come into being. In their study Design and the Question of History (2015), Fry, Dilnot and Stewart present us their proposal of “futurisation” as a new system in which multiple futures and thus the agents that make them possible can actively participate in a new pact of inhabitability, counteracting the negative effects of colonisation processes of modernity and their ontology. To put it differently, how can design contribute to decolonising that instrumental and extractivist relationship with the environment and recognise the voice and rights of more-than-human entities, offering more just and sustainable futures?
Designs of care and reparation
There is no doubt that one of the most persistent characteristics of modern/colonial design has been its insistent fascination with innovation (Mohamed, & Isaac 2020). The idea of design for innovation became the mark of contemporary design, and it circulates, conquering spaces in organisations, companies, and academia. As DiSalvo says in his chapter in this book, today more than ever, design is pushed by the need to make something new, to make something that did not exist before, to offer innovation regardless of the contexts or causes. More generally, the discourse of modernisation that has guided design is installed as a world in constant openness to innovation in all fields, always at the service of greater progress for humanity.
Various authors (Gudynas, 2013; Escobar, 2018; De la Cadena, 2015) have insisted that if we want to rethink the extractivist relationship that design establishes with the world and thus halt the ecosystemic damage that we are producing, we must interrogate this cult to the idea of innovation that is unique to the modern story in which humans are located at the cusp of project production. The issue of futures understood under the imperative of indefinite innovation and progress is that they leave aside other modes of approaching and getting involved with the inhabitability of the world, renouncing other ontologies of making the world. When we understand the future as innovation, we only reproduce the modern-colonial and presentist logic of a future that advances, eliminating the relationship with the multiplicity and potential of the past (Santos, 2018).
This is where the idea of care, maintenance and reparations takes on a central role as a heuristic and political tool to project other, more sustainable forms of inhabiting (De La Bellacasa, 2017). Designing more inhabitable futures in the face of the damage produced by the industrial/extractivist logic should reconsider the practice of maintaining and repairing the world. Developing a more ecological future cannot involve continuing to celebrate innovation and the idea of the project. Rather, it involves thinking about how to de-design the unsustainable ways of life that we have created, calling for an interspecies ethics of care (Haraway, 2016). In response to the dominant modus operandi of design culture, which is focused on creation and construction, some authors (Tonkinwise, 2018; Fry, 2020 Lindström & Ståhl, 2020; Latour, 2020; Bonnet et al., 2019; Callén, & López 2019) are examining how design can contribute through “not doing,” “elimination,” “redoing” or “deprojecting,” recreating the conditions for a form of habitability that is coherent with the limitations of the planet. These perspectives are highlighting a shift in design, which is ceasing to be conceived of solely through the prism of production. Scholars are beginning to explore another repertory of practices and modes of making the world that can contribute to protecting the fragility of the beings that inhabit the planet. In contrast to a culture of design that is focused on the ongoing construction of futures that are decoupled from earthly conditions, there is a need for a design that contributes to slowing down, repairing, or emptying out logics that do not align with the geological trajectory of Earth.
In the face of a planetary ecological crisis, we must challenge the idea of design for innovation and production of the new and explore designs for materializing an ethics of reciprocal care among the entities that live in our environments. As De la Bellacasa says, care is the recognition of an unavoidable condition: we are beings in interdependence who are vulnerable and radically relational. Or, following Ingold (2017), inhabiting is entering into careful correspondence with the development of things. Although it sounds paradoxical, it is likely that we will find the most radical innovation in the practices of reparations and care. We need acts of care, especially when it is urgent to cultivate “the art of living” in a damaged world (Savransky, 2021). There are no inhabitable relationships and places without objects that persist, without ongoing care and repair of our ecologies. The existences that populate our spaces do not persist naturally: if they last, it is because they are cared for, transmitted, and repaired. Inhabiting the world is not about innovating and producing, consuming, and extracting only. It is also about caring and maintaining. We must call for maintenance and care as a design practice that represents a way of being responsible for the relationships that we develop in our environment. It also constitutes a tool for decolonising methods that have limited our opportunities to access natures and ontologies other than human ones (Latour, 2012). It is a mode of recognising what comes before us, of restoring the relationship with alterity and, finally, of building alternative futures.
We could say that these ethics of repair are part of the resurgence of the notions of “Buen Vivir” (Gudynas 2011 & 2013; Hidalgo Capitán & Cubillos Guevara, 2014) as a foundation for the relationships that are built with the environment. The Buen Vivir as platform can be understood as a political proposal that breaks with the instrumental and extractivist forms of presenting the need for development of Latin America. The recovery of the values of AmerIndian peoples and forms of mutual care that they establish to relate to the environment provide an opportunity to project ways of inhabiting that are not based on over-exploiting our surroundings (Gudynas, 2013).
From this perspective, the ontological and epistemological systems of AmerIndian groups offer an opportunity to dispute and question the modernising-instrumental project and subvert the dependencies built from the Global North. The resurgence of these ontologies contributes to the reemergence of ways of relating to and transforming the world that are built through mutual care and balance. It is not a question of romanticising or stereotyping the type of relationship that AmerIndian groups had with their surroundings, but one of recognising forms of knowledge that are different from those that are currently dominant. The idea is one of disconnecting design from the uniformity of its expansionist ethos and approaching other world views and forms of coexistence between humans and other species. If the dominant forms of relating to the environment have been designed and inspired by a modern-colonial matrix, it is a matter of beginning to nourish the practice of design from other traditions and spaces.
Questioning projects of accumulation, innovation, and concentration of resources as a Dionysian exercise to satisfy our drives implies projecting new “arts of living.” These relationships which are not built on production can be observed in the work of Descola with Ecuador’s Ashuar groups (2005). Descola shows that the project of the moderns has a strong tendency to privilege production as a key element for the material conditions of social life, as a central line through which humans can transform nature (Descola, 2005: 440). Descola’s argument is that this productivist paradigm of human action in which action appears as a synonymous for manufacturing is not universal or applicable to all communities (Descola, 2001; 2005). He shows how the Ashuar present an ontological system in which humanity is understood as one actor in a complex web of bodies that must maintain an equilibrium for the survival of the world. In other words, for that community, the term “agricultural production” would make no sense because the purpose of their activities is not necessarily to create a consumable product that is ontologically separate from the environment that generated it (Wagner,
1991). As Descola says, Ashuar women do not “produce” the plants they grow. Rather, they use them to sustain a relationship of reciprocity and interact with these living beings in an effort to reconcile with their “souls” and promote growth (Descola, 1996; 2001).
The paradigm of production and innovation thus does not allow us to consider this relationship of mutual correspondence that Descola describes, in which the imperative is mutual maintenance and care. AmerIndian groups understand ecosystemic relationships from a holistic perspective. They understand that their needs and ways of intervening with their own life have impacts on the multiple ontologies that coexist and depend on harmonious coexistence (Descola, 2001). For AmerIndian worlds, all the entities that live together share a common soul that offers the opportunity to be social subjects. From that perspective, bodies are permeated by the relationships that they establish with others and are thus constantly changing based on interactions and effects.
Thinking about design from the idea of care thus implies paying attention to that more-than-human network that sustains life (Puig de la Bella Casa, 2017), evoking a form of design co-constructed and advanced by multiple bodies and agencies. This capacity allows one to leave aside the unidirectionality of modern Industrial Design, understanding it as a discipline that is no longer focused on the production of a specific object, but on the relationships that it attracts and produces.
In short, on a damaged planet (as Anna Tsing says in Tsing & Bubandt, 2017), we must question the idea of a future guided by the ethos of production and innovation and explore futures guided by the art of rehabilitation and reparation, addressing the task of making our world inhabitable and sustainable. Understanding connections of maintenance and care as a practice of future is a form of redesigning our relationship with the world, recognising what precedes us and restoring the relationship with alterity.
Design can serve as a platform for beginning to think about futures for care, that is, a design that is no longer centred on the idea of the individual and autonomous user, but that is oriented towards the different entities that co-inhabit and make our planet. Simply looking at the socio-environmental impacts of capitalist development and production, limited to the epistemology of modern-colonial design guided by the logic of hypergrowth, we can observe the need to generate forms of design that invite detachment, care, de-design, that let us identify the unsustainable elements of our society. We are surprised by the increased frequency of what we decide to call natural disasters — assuming that they escape our control — without recognising that our own designs and projects are causing the imbalance.
The challenge of beginning to repair the consequences of modern design implies recognising all the practices and voices that were made invisible by the Euro-Western order and the beings and ecosystems that have not been considered as design agents and subjects. When we speak of reparation as a possible heuristic alternative for questioning the instrumental relationship between human beings and the Earth, we must consider the need to repair the relationship with other subordinate groups and species. The processes of harm caused by certain dominant design logics can be reversed by all those forms of creative life that mobilise corrections and open up paths of ontological openness to different design forms that can recompose the living.
Prototyping coexistence from fragility
Moving design towards the discussion of a more-than-human future is an ethical responsibility given the disaster that we are facing as a planet. The crises that we are experiencing, and the collapse of the ideas of progress, rationality, and universality (Debaise & Stengers, 2015) have created a need for other world-making that can generate the conditions required for just cohabitation among all the entities that constitute our worlds.
But how can this transition be activated? How can forms of knowledge and co-existence be created with ontologically diverse participants? There is no question that one of the most interesting devices that design culture has to offer is prototypes. If we move away from a definition that reduces prototypes to a purely provisional testing technique to arrive at a final product, the prototype can constitute a privileged space of research and creation that can be used to rethink our forms of relating to the environment, generating specific more-than-human design situations (Tironi & Hermansen, 2018; 2020). In the face of the planetary dimension of the problems we are experiencing, and the disorientation caused by the crisis of inhabitability, the prototyping tool can place a fundamental role for exploring situated forms of connecting to the more-than-human. Understood as an epistemic tool that has the potential to create cultures of experimental making (Corsín Jimnénez, 2014), the prototype emerges as a space of ontological opening for reimagining our forms of relating to the world. At the same time, it is a conceptual figure that contributes to rethinking more inclusive and fair futures. Below, I present three properties that can be activated through prototyping and that open up the spaces of experimentation necessary to go beyond anthropocentric design.
The first characteristic that makes this device a privileged place for generating more-than-human futures is its fragility. Prototypes are designed to create knowledge and learning based on the failures that they experience. The material fragility and malleability of the prototype allows it to make available events and situations that are revealed in mistakes. Contemporary society has made resilience and innovation one of its most prized telos, but prototyping processes make fragility and temporariness its reason for being. Facing the absence of reflection from and with fragility (De la Bellacasa, 2017; Dennis and Pontille, 2022), the prototype is open to what we could call an ecology of fragility. It does not only legitimate failure as a mode of knowledge. The fragility inherent to the prototype sharpens the attention to the set of connections and resistances that emerge from the testing process. The trial-and-error tests conducted as part of this process make visible the properties of the agencies that come into play. Before the tests that lead to the prototyping process, the properties that agencies have are ignored. Or, as Latour put it, reality is what resist the test (Latour, 1984).
A second characteristic derived from this fragile mode of existence of the prototype is the ontological opening that this device makes possible. The prototype allows for the inclusion of more-than-human agencies in the reflection on the constitution of the social, to the power to be used to think through the relationship with energy (Wilkie et at, 2015), ecosystems, or animals (Lenskjold & Jönsson, 2017; Tironi & Hermansen, 2018; Avila, 2022). The provisional and fragile nature of the prototyping process allows us to speak of a form of ontological diplomacy or hospitality of this testing technology (Tironi & Hermansen, 2018; Avila, 2022), as it allows relationships with agencies, forms of thought and ways of feeling that go beyond human discourse to be created. While one of the challenges that the environmental crisis poses is how to open ourselves up to listen to other species and more-thanhuman agencies, the prototype allows for an opening up to multiple forms of existence. The prototype makes “the other” visible through the traces that agencies leave in the process of trial-and-error, articulating negotiations and associations that cannot be reduced to the word.
The third characteristic of the prototype that I wish to highlight is its capacity to prefigure “what could be” that is, a form of anti-normative and speculative intervention. The prototype understood as an open process and not as a static object activates alternatives to what “is” or “should be” in order to explore uncertain, inconclusive or undefined possibilities. The fluctuating and iterative activity of prototyping is invested with a certain transformative vitality that allows it to challenge the preestablished idea of having to think that things are as they are. It invites us to inhabit failures and multiply the possibilities of futures. The prototype as a dialogic platform allows forms of knowledge and perspectives that are often divergent to be integrated and taken up, opening the possibility of design that is involved in processes of change.
The capacity of the prototype is not limited to packaging or setting the characteristics of a product. It has the potential to generate open and experimental forms of knowledge, facilitating social transitions towards more just and sustainable societies and multiplying possible worlds instead of unifying them.
The power of prototyping as an epistemic tool is its capacity to articulate the “what if,” to not close problems. It is an incomplete and unfinished form of knowledge that is open to possible futures, to what could come into being. The “what if” is a way to generate questions and forms of knowledge that are in process of being defined. If the work of diplomacy that Latour (2012) proposed involves creating dialogues with different modes of existence that humans do not yet know of, prototyping as a research technology invites us to open ourselves up to these activities of experimentation and exploration. It is not a matter of turning prototyping into a depoliticised tool of possible futures, but rather a question of mobilising this tool to decolonise our modes of approaching reality, expanding forms of epistemic equity. In short, prototyping allows modes of description and association of different entities to operate, including the voices of more-than-human worlds.